


Before this ends up as another memory

by juliasgoodusername (itsureismyusername)



Category: Not Another D&D Podcast (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, I think about fungi a lot and Moonshine was such a good outlet for that, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, The Crick, but like existential angst, but what am I supposed to do now that campaign 1 is over????, despite it being too short for that, graphic depictions of cuddles and emotional intimacy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:53:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24175402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsureismyusername/pseuds/juliasgoodusername
Summary: Facing immortality is easier, but also way harder, when you have your once-in-a-lifetime person at your side, and a network of concerned fungal babies asking questions you can't answer. Set after Episode 100.
Relationships: Moonshine Cybin & Hardwon Surefoot, Moonshine Cybin/Hardwon Surefoot, platonic? romantic? how about both and neither?
Comments: 16
Kudos: 62





	Before this ends up as another memory

**Author's Note:**

> Like everyone else, I’m processing my emotions about the finale. The title comes from the song “Are You Bored Yet?” by Wallows, and tbh this fic is like line for line inspired by it. Seriously google the lyrics if you don't know it, I'm not being abstract at all with my interpretation.

After saving the world, parties erupt all over Bahumia. They continue for weeks, even months on end in some places. The world had been saved countless times before, sure, but something about this time - maybe that the heroes were declared demi-gods of the people, maybe that the act of saving was the literal answered prayer of millions, or maybe even that the saving was so imperfect, that so many had to suffer first, made them appreciate the peace even more. The point is, the Band of Boobs had more than their fair share of Jamboreens and Fey-chellas to attend in the year following their fight with Thiala.

And yet, across all the planes, realms, nooks and crannies of their world, nobody threw a banger quite like they did in The Crick. And does that really surprise anyone?

Moonshine takes a deep drink of crick water, a feast of jambalaya sitting warmly in her belly. 

“Hardwon, you crazy motherfucker!” cries a Petri. “If you was a young’n I’d throw your rascally ass in the timeout bag!”

“Just try it you son of a bitch!” the fighter hollers back, his voice cast from a surprising elevation. Moonshine looks up to see Hardwon standing on top of one of the taller stumps. It’s not the same old stump of Melf’s he claimed as his own a few months ago, this one might be Cooter’s (not that it matters, ‘mi stump es su stump’ rules are particularly absolute during a party). And is he-? Yep, he’s built a full bonfire  _ on top of the stump _ .

“I’m serious man, you wanna wrastle about it? Cause I-Oh, hey Moonshine!” Hardwon cuts off his challenge as soon as he catches her eye, raises a crawfish-filled hand to wave in her direction. The sun is low at his back, but a wide grin beams through his shadow.

“Hardwon-” Moonshine can’t stop the laughter that peels out of her lips, “what are you doing starting a fire on a dry old tree?”

“I came up here to watch the sunset, and I got cold,” he replies matter-of-factly. “You wanna join me? Bring some more of that bathtub mead though, I’m kinda thirsty and I’m barely feeling anything yet.” Even in backlit shade, the sway in his stance and bright full-body blush make it clear that Hardwon is most certainly feeling whatever inebriant he has ingested so far. 

“Oh Melora,” she sighs, rising from her perch on a mossy log. Something in her wavers as she stands, however, like headrush. Maybe she isn’t exactly sober either. She looks down at her feet, blinking away sunspots from her eyes. Her stance is firm, tethered to the swampy biome as always. Momentum carries her one graceful elven step after the other until she’s suddenly at the base of the stump, a crisp line of tracks in the mud behind her. She puts a hand to the bark, counts a usual number of fingers. So not drunk then.

Her spore-filled blood tingles with a question.  _ What’s wrong? _

Moonshine has always considered herself to be pretty in touch with her emotions; she is her Mee Maw’s daughter after all. 

_ “Some folks think hiding a thought makes it go away. But there ain't nothing to be hidden in nature, Moonshine.” _ She used to say.  _ “What you feel is what is, as real as every part of the ecosystem. Those feelings flow through you, just like oxygen, or, y’know, piss and shit.” _

As much as she appreciated those lessons, she could never tell how literal a nature metaphor was when it came from Jolene’s mouth. It’s times like this she wishes she could have trained under Marabelle. As a fellow fungal queen, she had far more practical experience, and probably wouldn't bother to weave tapestries of abstract wisdom when it came to the realities of dealing with magical symbiotic mushrooms.

Realities like how fungal networks  _ can  _ be used to send messages between organisms, by choice, but at the end of the day there’s no shutting off the connection. The stronger her druidic powers become, the more latent information she becomes instantaneously aware of thanks to her children. They don’t always  _ speak _ so much as convey through transmission of chemicals, meaning she feels in her entire body, not just her mind, if something is off with the soil, or if the weather is about to change. She can tell who’s toilet’s been upper-decked just by the change in nitrogen. Sometimes she’ll start laughing, seemingly for no reason. Bev will send her a questioning look, and she’ll spread the message to her fellow nature kindred through the spores, and then to the rest of the party, until they are all cackling over the distant goof.

Mycorrhizal fungi can detect and transfer almost anything through their networks. But that means, no matter how internally enlightened Moonshine  _ thinks  _ she is, her children will respond even to the thoughts she hasn’t acknowledged herself.

_ What is it Moonshine? What’s wrong mother?  _ Their gentle prodding persists as she scrambles up the stump.

Hardwon offers his hand (now sans-crawfish) to help her over the last of the climb. She takes it, Predator-handshake style. He lifts her like she’s made of air, smiles like he’s made of sunfire. A stiff autumn wind blows hair over his face, loose from its usual topknot. She shivers.

“See! I told you it was cold up here,” Hardwon shouts smugly, unconscious of his own volume. “Pretty sick setup, huh?” he gestures to the rest of the stump-top. 

The bonfire blazes atop a layer of stones and mud, still concerning, but better than nothing to separate the flames from the old wood below. Hardwon collapses into a lichen covered boulder like it’s a La-Z-Boy. To the left of it is a stockpile of hoarded crawfish, no doubt cherry-picked and plump with brown. To the right is a red solo cup cradling a speaking stone, blasting at full volume, yet nearly drowned out by the overpowering Crick music and general noise-making around them.

Moonshine takes a breath. She sits down next to her friend. Hardwon is a friend. A once-in-an-endless-lifetime friend. Nothing to feel weird about.

Mee Maw’s voice echoes in memory. _ “So yeah, feelings are like shit. But even when you bury your shit, it’s still part of the soil, still part of nature, and that shit’s gonna fertilize an’ grow into somethin’ come springtime. That there’s what we call the wisdom of nature; the earth is all-knowing, making flowers out of e’rything even when we don’ see it.”  _

She fights the urge to jump off this stump and demand clearer answers from the real, present-day Mee Maw, who is no doubt stirring up a good time of her own nearby.

///

Hardwon sees a mixture of something unknowable pass over Moonshine’s face. 

Hardwon has never been in touch with his emotions. He has spent the majority of his life feeling out of place, and a majority of  _ that  _ majority was with hyper-macho dwarves. His young hairless face wasn’t just the easiest to pick on for its lack of beard, it also made his hurt easier to perceive. _ ‘Walls Up’ _ was simply a matter of survival at the dwarfanage. Knowing how to cry and process a moment was even worse than knowing how to read. 

Gemma was the first person he could remember sharing any kind of honest feelings with, and even then his own feelings would churn up a hurricane inside him just from thinking about her.

Since he met Moonshine, however, he’s come to see there’s more to life than mental masonry and gale-force freakouts. Around her, he finally learns to let some of his thoughts flow their course, and more often than not, he finds still waters at the end of it. With her. She’s always there at the end of it. 

So it strikes him as unfair when he sees her brow furrow, bringing a wrinkle to her otherwise ageless face. Even his half-elf body, younger than the human one he was born into, no doubt displays more natural creases in the sharp contrast of the dying light. Wrinkles are his job. They fit her poorly, which is saying something because she can wear just about anything and own it.

She joins him on his favorite couch-rock, that he hauled up here all the way from his own stump. He could say something to her, Beverly probably would, but that’s not his style. Instead, he wraps his arm around, pulling her into a classic One Big Boulder cuddle. She morphs into the embrace perfectly, squeezing back like only she can. A perfectly matched grapple check.

They reside in each other like that without speaking for a bit. Blues and oranges turn to purples and pinks in the sky, and the shadows cast by torches and campfires grow sharper than the blurred lengths of trees from the sinking sun.

The stars are just starting to emerge when he feels something broadcast over Moonshine's rapport spores. It's not an exact message, more like a sensation of loneliness, a longing.

Hardwon flushes with sudden insecurity. "Somewhere you'd rather be? You bored or something?"

"No," Moonshine responds quickly. "Definitely not. Frankly I'm not sure what's up with me lately, but when you say that, it feels at least like the opposite."

"Okay…" Hardwon says, not really understanding. "You know you could tell me if I was boring you though right?" The Crick may have adopted him, but this is Moonshine he’s talking about. The living embodiment of all that is chaotic and exciting. For all that he’s rowdy, even reckless, Moonshine is  _ wild,  _ with enough magic to do pretty much anything she wanted. Unlike him, an illiterate damage-dealer weighed down by a history of fuck-ups.

"Hardwon, you can never bore me."

_ Really? _ He thinks, which comes out as, "Oh yeah, right, of course. ...You too."

It's quiet for another moment, Kid Kobald reverberating off the plastic cup.

Moonshine shifts, hooks a dirt-caked ankle around his own. "Are you sure Hardwon? Do you have any idea how long you're gonna hang around?"

"Well hey, you sure as hell can't get rid of me now. Crick life for life baby!"

"But that's the thing,” she huffs, “I can spend my time however I want, and I know I'll always have time to do something else. Same goes for Beverly, Mee Maw, even Pee Paw Luc's gonna be there to say hey and stop by the Grandma Tree whenever we fancy. But then I think, I dunno, I guess I feel selfish around you because you don't... I feel like I want to take every second I have with you, but I wonder if that's only because you don't have as many seconds t’ spare as the rest of us.” 

“Hey, half-elves live longer than most humans y’know,” he protests.

“Just under two hundred years, from the ones I met,” she confirms.

“Yeah, exactly!”

“So you have some time. You could find someone, like what Bev and Erlin have. Another Gemma.”

At this Hardwon tenses, sitting up quickly but holding back from jostling her too much. “I’m never going to have another Gemma,” he says sternly, cupping her smooth freckled cheek with a calloused hand, “and I already fuckin’ have you.”

“You say that like you know what it means,” she teases. ‘ _ Walkin’ around like you know who your daddy is’  _ mimicked in tone, a particularly ironic Crick-ism between a pair of once-thought-to-be-bastards, now both having met their fathers over the course of their adventures. “But really, Hardwon, do you think you have words for whatever this is?”

He growls lightly, hand dropping her cheek to rustle her hair. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t thought about this… a lot. She doesn’t quite feel like his sister. Definitely not his mother (or step-mother,  _ gross _ ). A teammate, a friend, a best friend - all true, but not enough. Has he considered ‘girlfriend’? Yeah, of course, they’re both smokin’ hot, but that kind of label requires a mutual spoken agreement between people, and one that would still be superseded by whatever they already are. 

He looks away, toward the horizon, totally not blushing. “It’s… we’re… whatever,” he scoffs. He slumps back into his original cuddle posture, and when he looks back, her brow is still pressed, but her eyes are sad too. Of course he went and made things fucking worse. Dumbass.

“Don’t it make you feel cheated to be spending all this time with me? Knowing that you could be living a life with someone, growing old  _ with  _ someone, but I’ll still be here for centuries, eons, when all this is just something to forget? Because it makes me feel... _ you  _ make me feel...I don’t know.”

Moonshine isn’t looking at Hardwon, nor the sunset, when she says this. He follows her gaze to the bonfire. It’s still going strong, but it reached its full peak some minutes ago, embers peaking at the edges, fortelling its eventual fate. A small piece of charcoaled branch falls from the pire, reddened by the breeze, before blowing off the stump entirely.

Hardwon Surefoot has faced death many times, and in just about every sense of the phrase. He has also dealt with losing a lot as a result - Gemma, his parents, numerous substitute parental-figures, his body, his identity. Every instance left its mark, a pain that he’ll probably never fully let go. And in every case he also got to have something new and unexpected, be it a chance for closure, or seeing his mom become a bad-ass leader of Shadowfell. Death, as Moonshine said herself many times, is one of the beautiful parts of life.

But then he remembers what happened when they faced off with the horseman. When Moonshine fell. How desperate he was, how certain he was that he would give up anything to make the horseman bring her back. He wasn’t just scared of losing her. He was terrified of his own existence, of going on without her by his side. It’s a feeling that, shamefully, he’s never exactly had for anyone else. 

Dwelling on that, he realizes it’s the same feeling Moonshine sends through the spores, only shifted, as if playing on a lower frequency. It was a moment of panic for him, back then, but for her, it’s a slow certainty.

He doesn’t have the same refined control over the spore connection that she does, but he closes his eyes, focuses. Tries to send the part of him that feels the same way.

///

The question echoes in the mycorrhizal fungi, from both directions, two bodies of one organism: 

_ What  _ _  
_ _ am  _ _  
_ _ I  _ _  
_ _ going  _ _  
_ _ to  _ _  
_ _ do  _ __  
_ without  _ _  
_ __ you?

The fire snaps, the sound of trapped steam splitting a log, releasing sparks that die quickly.

“Hey Moonshine-”

“Yeah?”

“Pass me some of those crawfish, they’re gonna get cold.”

///

The lack of a resolution tastes bitter in Moonshine’s mouth, ruining the flavor of perfectly good crawfish. (They had, of course, gone tepid long before Hardwon said something, but nothing a little cantrip couldn’t fix.) Again, they wait without speaking. The sun finally slips entirely out of sight. The wind picks up in the cool night and fresh oxygen makes the waning fire burn hotter, but the heat it gives is nothing compared to the warmth she feels from Hardwon’s flushed skin. At some point he starts humming along to the music a bit with each exhaled breath.

“You never got to answerin’ my question,” she mutters.

He grunts in response, prodding for clarification. 

“Does it feel unfair to you, having met me? Would you ever rather just move on, than wait to die here?” Her face feels hot and swollen, her eyes unusually wet.

“Honestly Moonshine?” he talks into her tangled mess of hair, “It feels like I’ve known you my whole life. Even the parts that we missed out on having together.”

“...Yeah.” Moonshine nods, nuzzling into his chest. The agreement is profound, the spores confirm as much.

“So like, who’s to say it won’t keep feeling like that, even for those parts in the future?”

She shrugs. “The future’s awful big.”

“Yeah,” he says, “and the way I feel about you is bigger.”

It's not eloquent. Neither are they.

She closes her eyes. If buried feelings turn into flowers, might as well appreciate them while they’re in bloom.

**Author's Note:**

> If Hardshine wasn't hetero I'd probably scream that it was queerbaiting but something about the whole cast's outright refusal to put a label on it, Jake especially....it just feels right. I know what it feels like to have a non-romantic soulmate and I'm pretty darn aro-ace so I imagine it's similar but different for Hardwon and Moonshine who are decidedly NOT aro-ace. Don't we all love yearning for something we already have?


End file.
